Upgrade StorageHow I worked around bibliography problem in a very long phd thesis document
Hi
I submitted my PhD thesis a month and a half ago, and used Zotero throughout the writing process. It was great until literally the final stage when I had the full document 97,000 text in Microsoft Word and pressed Insert Bibliography. Nothing happened for about 10 minutes and it also didn't work when I tried again multiple times. I tried saving it and opening it and nothing appeared where I had tried to insert the long bibliography (I also tried all the various options of turning it off and on, uninstalling and reinstalling first the word plugin then zotero etc.) This was a source of panic and I thought I'd share what I did in case it helps anyone with a similar problem (I didn't find any discussion of quite the same problem on the forum or elsewhere online).
I was using my laptop which is a 3 year old samsung running Intel Processor i3. Basically I think my bibliography, at 15,000 words in total, was just too big for the processing power of my laptop. My friend installed zotero on his much more powerful desktop (set up for gaming) and managed to make it work. i.e. he opened the word document which contains the references within it, clicked zotero settings on the little plugin bar on word to make sure the document had synced with the zotero program, and then clicked insert bibliography. On his computer it took about 3 minutes, but it was obvious the computer was working away on something.
Not especially technical, but wanted to share my experience for anyone in a similar situation!
Cheers
PR
I submitted my PhD thesis a month and a half ago, and used Zotero throughout the writing process. It was great until literally the final stage when I had the full document 97,000 text in Microsoft Word and pressed Insert Bibliography. Nothing happened for about 10 minutes and it also didn't work when I tried again multiple times. I tried saving it and opening it and nothing appeared where I had tried to insert the long bibliography (I also tried all the various options of turning it off and on, uninstalling and reinstalling first the word plugin then zotero etc.) This was a source of panic and I thought I'd share what I did in case it helps anyone with a similar problem (I didn't find any discussion of quite the same problem on the forum or elsewhere online).
I was using my laptop which is a 3 year old samsung running Intel Processor i3. Basically I think my bibliography, at 15,000 words in total, was just too big for the processing power of my laptop. My friend installed zotero on his much more powerful desktop (set up for gaming) and managed to make it work. i.e. he opened the word document which contains the references within it, clicked zotero settings on the little plugin bar on word to make sure the document had synced with the zotero program, and then clicked insert bibliography. On his computer it took about 3 minutes, but it was obvious the computer was working away on something.
Not especially technical, but wanted to share my experience for anyone in a similar situation!
Cheers
PR